Free Republic

Within months of the law’s passage, the state began borrowing hundreds of millions of dollars against the anticipated revenue. Bond documents claimed video gambling machines would raise $300 million each year to help cover the debt payments. It wasn’t until 2017, eight years after the legalization of video gambling, that the state came close to collecting that amount. By then, video gambling had brought in less than $1 billion to pay the bond debt — $1.3 billion short of what lawmakers anticipated. But the costs of video gambling had already exacted a heavy toll on the state.

Randall Stephenson, AT&T’s chairman-CEO, summoned all of his folksy Oklahoma earnestness as he made an enthusiastic pitch to Wall Street analysts about the telephone company’s bold efforts to transform itself into a multimedia powerhouse. It was late November, less than six months after AT&T had wrapped up its $85 billion acquisition of Time Warner. But before Stephenson could wax poetic about his plans to revitalize HBO, Warner Bros. or other newly acquired AT&T subsidiaries, he felt compelled to address the elephant in the room. “If you hear nothing else this afternoon, I want you to hear me on this,” Stephenson...

The U.S. Justice Department now says that all internet gambling is illegal.A November opinion made public Monday reversed a 2011 opinion on the Wire Act, which established the law as applicable to only sports betting. The DOJ claims that the 2011 opinion misinterpreted the statute and reinterprets the Wire Act to encompass all forms of gambling that crosses state boundaries. The opinion could have wide-reaching effects in states that sell lottery tickets online or where online gambling is legal. This number has increased in recent months following the Supreme Court’s decision to legalize sports betting in the U.S. last year....

Pornographers are bracing for the first major obscenity clampdown in three decades under President Trump’s new pick for attorney general, William Barr, a strident social conservative whose views threaten the lucrative industry. Anti-porn campaigners were thrilled with Trump's selection of Barr, previously attorney general under President George H.W. Bush, noting his enthusiastic obscenity prosecutions in the early ‘90s. Pornographers are taking the threat seriously, but argue a crackdown would be hypocritical under the thrice-married Trump. His links to the industry include softcore Playboy cameos, an alleged affair with Playmate of the Year Karen McDougal, an alleged tryst with hardcore star...

Depending on who you talk to, the reinterpretation of the Wire Act by the U.S. Justice Department will either be no problem for Nevada — or a big problem. Gaming industry legal experts have begun analyzing the effects of the new interpretation of a 23-page opinion issued Monday by Assistant Attorney General Steven Engel of the department’s Office of Legal Counsel. The 1961 Wire Act originally was intended to block sports betting across state lines through telephone and wire communications as a means of deterring organized crime.

Judicial Watch is investigating yet another Obama Justice Department scandal this time involving the reversal of a law passed by Congress decades ago banning all forms of online gambling, a move that allowed companies—and big Democratic Party donors—with connections to Attorney General Eric Holder to amass huge profits. It involves the Wire Act, enacted by Congress in 1961 as an antiracketeering measure to prohibit the use of wire communications for the interstate transfer of bets or wagers. When the internet came around years later the law was naturally applied to online gambling and U.S. courts, as well as the Department...

Gambling figures prominently in this story, but this isn’t a story about gambling. It’s a story about an administration misusing its power to benefit its friends. It’s a story about the corrupt purchase of our government. For half a century, Democratic and Republican administrations have interpreted the Wire Act, passed in 1961, as prohibiting the sale of lottery tickets by phone or wire, and in more recent years over the Internet. That changed on Christmas 2011, when the Obama/Holder Department of Justice reinterpreted the Wire Act. The DOJ ruled that the Wire Act allows lotteries to sell tickets online....